Good People (33 page)

‘Accused!' shouted Styopa-Podolsky. ‘Are you poets, too?'

‘Citizen Investigative Magistrate, aren't you embarrassed to ask?' one of the prisoners shouted back. ‘Can't you see that here at your feet crawls the eminent poetess Yekatrina Mikhailovna Ulitskaya? And she wants to read one of her masterpieces to you: “Stars in the Windows of the NKVD”?'

‘A counter-revolutionary poem of the first order!' shouted Styopa-Podolsky.

‘Precisely the opposite. Have you read it?'

‘Of course, it's by Boris Lapin.'

‘Shame!' shouted the woman. ‘Lapin wrote “Stars in the Windows of the Cheka”, which is an entirely different poem! And you still call yourself the head of the department responsible for literary matters?' Suddenly Sasha realised that she hadn't seen Reznikov all evening. ‘Styopa,' she said and turned to him in the dark.

He gripped her arm, and dragged her after him. It was plain that something terrible had happened. They walked around the bar. Styopa pushed a wooden door with no handle, painted white like the wall, and they slipped through it. She remembered he had once said to her: ‘Every clever investigator has to have his own Kerkoporta.' They stepped down a tortuous corridor. They could hear the actors clearly, and she understood that they were behind the stage.

‘We won't have another opportunity to speak freely,' whispered Styopa. ‘Maybe I'm being followed. In another seven minutes the first
act will be finished, the lights will come up, and you and I will already be back in the hall, in exactly the same place.'

‘Reznikov?' she said.

‘He and none other,' he said with a bitter laugh.

‘We love Comrade Stalin!' an actor shouted. ‘Did he give us glorious industry or not? He gave us a prize—the union took what we got. He gave us a flat—the neighbour and his sister came to squat. Our poems he read—people said, “Print them when he's dead.” He lowered prices—didn't give out ration books. He repaired the roads…'

‘Too bad he sent us to the boondocks,' chorused the other actors.

The small windows in the corridor were broken. It was cold, but her body was burning.

‘They wrote a charming skit, those saboteur authors,' Styopa said.

‘I don't understand,' shouted Styopa-Podolsky from the stage. ‘You're not being straight with me. Write a proper confession, and maybe I'll arrange minus twelve for you instead of Kolyma. Are those poems bourgeois or not? Subversive or not?'
*

‘Do you remember Agranov?' Styopa said quietly. He was standing against her. His lips clung to her ear, and his breath warmed it. ‘He was one of my closest friends. He was tried for treason and shot in 1938. I was very sorry. He was a man I admired. When they arrested him and Molchanov, it was clear to me that I would be arrested too. Nothing happened. But apparently my name still came up in their investigations, and Reznikov, our old friend, heard about it, saw an opportunity, and exploited it. He went to Moscow and “revealed my true face”. These days, Sashinka, that's how to get ahead. He accused me of continuing on with the plots of Agranov and his band. I don't know whether Agranov was guilty—maybe he wasn't particularly clever, but meticulous and loyal, and in any event we were only colleagues. Okay, we also shared a few women. But it wasn't just Agranov: Reznikov invented some more accusations. In short, I'm in
a life-and-death struggle with him, and for the moment he has the upper hand.'

‘No one will believe a contemptible man like Reznikov,' she said in despair. ‘Your friends surely know he's a liar.'

‘I've already heard that I'm going to be investigated. Most of my friends don't know yet. When they do, they'll turn their backs on me the way we have on everyone who got into trouble. I'm innocent,' he said sadly. ‘From my youth I've tied my fate to the revolution, have wholeheartedly done everything asked of me, but sometimes misunderstandings arise…No matter, time is short. By the end of February you'll be transferred to western Belorussia. I'm taking care of it so that the transfer will seem orderly. We mustn't give the impression that you're sneaking away in the dead of the night. We're kicking you upstairs. They need sophisticated investigators there—in the past few months, after we liberated western Belorussia from the Polish dogs, we've discovered how many enemy groups are there. Don't say anything now. You understand that there's no alternative. If I fall, Reznikov will bring you down. He goes hard and fast, one of those shock workers who always outperforms. He's an
Udranik
, he'll have all the right arguments. The very fact that I employed you here, even if I was given permission—that will be enough for him. In Belorussia you'll be far away. You know how to stand out, Sasha, and how to find strong patrons who can repel an attack if it comes. I know what is tormenting you. Believe me, for a long time, secretly, being very careful, I've been making inquiries. I'll tell you this: one of them is serving in the Fourth Army, which is stationed in western Belorussia, and you can meet him there.'

‘Styopa,' she whispered and leaned her cheek on his shoulder.

‘Don't worry.' His voice sounded muffled. ‘In the interrogation I won't say your name. I give you my word of honour.'

What kind of a person did he think she was, if he thought that was disturbing her now? Her temples pounded. She heard them and felt burning in the place Styopa had breathed on.

Maybe he was right? How could she know? Recently some of her
gestures seemed to have been made by themselves, and she found it hard to determine whether there was truth in them or whether they were entirely false, if they were hers, or if she had copied them from someone else whose behaviour seemed flawless. All these things whirled through her mind while she raced down the corridor after him.

Styopa-Podolsky screeched from the stage, ‘You fools! Compete with me in real poetry!

Just a few scraps of memory remain, hinting that once, long ago, we believed there was a kernel of truth inside us, something that we wouldn't buy or sell. We imagine we are putting on a show for the world, but in the bedroom we still retain that old truth, as sweet as the taste of childhood. But in the soul there are no partitions like in Vlada and Kolya's room; everything slips into everything else. We think we can keep juggling, pretending, until one day, with unexpected sobriety, we understand what perhaps we already knew: our habits are us.

Only when they were standing in the hall again and clapping for her husband, and Styopa enthusiastically stuck two fingers between his lips and produced a deafening whistle, did the meaning of his words become clear to her: Vlada or Kolya.

WARSAW

SUMMER 1940

I've become a sentimental person, Thomas thought.

Just now he had sat down to breakfast in the Bristol Hotel with respectable men. A friendly spirit enveloped the table, and all the participants, especially Albert Kresling, who had recently been named to a senior position in the
Haupttreuhandstelle Ost
*
and was regarded as Göring's man in Poland, were keenly interested in his work. And while everyone was praising the model, where had he been? He was composing a few passages to Clarissa in his mind: ‘Darling, your last letter upset me, and since then a month has gone by. Are you hinting that I'm not making an effort to see you? There's nothing I desire more. I have already explained to you why the idea that you should visit me in Warsaw doesn't please me: my workload won't leave us time to be together. But in September I swear we'll travel to wherever you want. I'm putting the whole world at your disposal.'

Thomas now stood in the plaza outside the Bristol Hotel, which was bathed in sun. He felt drunk with the light. He looked at two trees that appeared to be leaning on each other. While they were sitting on the second floor balcony, Weller had pointed at them: ‘See, Thomas, they're just like us.'

That remark was of course meant to mollify him. All week long tension had raged between them about building the wall around the Jews. Thomas opposed it, especially in the centre of the city, arguing that such a large ghetto would consume more than it produced and seriously damage the economy. It would clog the traffic and basically strangle Warsaw. Besides, ‘It was liable to cause despair and desperate acts,' as he had written in answer to a question from the district governor. Weller disagreed: ‘The economic calculations are incorrect. Herr Heiselberg calculates the needs of the Jews as if they were Aryans, but the idea of a ghetto surrounded by a wall is not new and has proven effective in the past. In the fifteenth century, when it was decided to build a wall around the Jewish houses in Frankfurt, doubtful voices were raised. But Friedrich III's decision was firm, the wall was built, the Jews had their
Judengasse
, and that arrangement remained in force for nearly three hundred years.' Weller could have mentioned the ghetto that had already been established in Lodz, but it was typical of him to embellish his argument with a pointless historical example.

Thomas replied to Weller with a stiff memorandum: ‘In Frankfurt at that time there were about two hundred Jews, and one or two streets were enough for them. How many Jews live in Warsaw? Nearly four hundred thousand. The planned wall will surround extensive parts of the city. The comparison is an insult to one's intelligence.' Thomas suspected that Weller didn't really disagree with him—he also felt, like his colleagues in the Foreign Office, that the persecution of the Jews harmed Germany's international image—but he was taking the opportunity to demonstrate independence and extend his influence. Maybe he sensed weakness in his colleague. Thomas identified the challenge and declared that the idea was opposed to the spirit of the Model of the Polish People. Weller retorted that he understood
the model just as well as Thomas. In the end, Thomas accepted Weller's opinion and was satisfied with the stipulation that his nuanced reservations should be presented in their official response.

After the dispute was settled, more or less, they resumed discussion of their work. Weller kept insisting that their friendship was dearer to him than any controversy, but tension seethed under this veil of cooperation. Even their Russian lessons were postponed on various pretexts. Thomas suspected that his rapid progress was putting Weller off. He already had a fine accent, and if Weller were to lose his advantage in grammar and vocabulary, the student might outdo his teacher.

Now Thomas looked closely at the trees and saw that one was standing straight, while the other was leaning on it. He hoped that Weller had noticed too. He lazily crossed the bright plaza, and tried to skirt the facades to stay out of the sun. At that late morning hour on Nowy Swiat the only shade was a thin strip on the corner. Thomas loved these weekend mornings, especially on clear days, when the horizon seemed endless behind the roofs and the tall streetlights—but lately it had taken an effort to be enthusiastic about the beauty of the day. He had to admit that the sky, for all its splendour, no longer stirred him as it had. The world was observing the Wehrmacht with astonishment, as it won impressive victories in Western Europe, where new and thrilling opportunities lay at the feet of the Germans, but he was stuck in Warsaw, juggling expert reports and sparring with Weller. Even the compliments that Kresling passed on—telling him that the Reichsmarschall, while spending a weekend at Carinhall, had leafed through the model and admitted that indeed there were a few people with common sense in that useless von Ribbentrop's ministry—were somehow dissatisfying.

Two SS officers were walking some distance in front of him. One of them, tall and broad-shouldered, with light hair and a suntanned face, looked like Hermann Kreizinger. Thomas was afraid it really was Hermann, though he knew it couldn't be. Perhaps this certainty even preceded the fear that it might be him. Since Clarissa's letter, when she had told him about that bastard's visit, Thomas had
abandoned any hope that Hermann would leave him alone. No doubt the fact that Thomas was thriving fanned Hermann's hatred, but he would have to get used to it: Thomas had no intention of fading away. And so, even though he suspected Hermann was plotting against him, his sting grew duller as the months passed, and Hermann was relegated to the margins of his consciousness. Perhaps boredom also softened his fear. Sometimes an inner voice grumbled: If that thug wants to invest all his energy in me, let him. When he acts, we'll deal with it; that's life, even my enemies deserve a place in the world. In any event it was hard to prepare for an attack by Hermann, who had become a kind of ghost; none of Thomas's acquaintances knew where he was stationed.

The two officers passed him. The tanned Standartenführer nodded.

‘Have a fine morning,' Thomas said.

Soldiers with narrow eyes under helmets gleaming in the sun stood motionless at the gates of the compound where the university had once been. Whenever he passed those poor soldiers he remembered the time that he and Weller had volunteered for military duty at the Wehrmacht headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. That was the day the Western powers declared war against Germany. They made an appointment with Generaloberst Fromm, and Thomas said, ‘With respect to my conscience, it is very hard for us to continue with our work in the Foreign Office, crucial as it may be, while our friends risk their lives for the Fatherland.'

‘Herr Heiselberg does suffer from pains in his ribs,' Weller added, ‘and as for me, by the time I finish telling your doctor about all my aches, the war will be over. Nevertheless we place ourselves at the disposal of the Fatherland.'

Weller put on a steadfast look. They received certificates of exemption and praise from Fromm, who called them ‘role models for all those degenerates in the Foreign Office'. That was the end of the matter.